60 Songs That Explain the '90s - Gin Blossoms—“Hey Jealousy”

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Rob explores the 1992 jangle-rock hit “Hey Jealousy” and how it integrates the darkness of its lyrical content into its bright sonic framework. This episode was originally produced as a Music and Talk show available exclusively on Spotify. Find the full song on Spotify or wherever you get your music. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Hanif Abdurraqib Producer: Isaac Lee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

And if you don't expect too much from me, you might not be let down, said the sad men with guitars to the 1990s. These guitars could crunch or roar or screech or snarl. But prettiest of all, saddest of all, and maybe even angriest of all, they could jangle. My name is Rob Harvilla. I'm a staff writer at The Ringer. This podcast is called 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. and I need to complain about something. It has bothered me for 28 years or so that two consecutive songs on the Gin Blossoms album,

New Miserable Experience, start basically the same way. It's their major label debut from 1992. That was my favorite song on the album. It's called Found Out About You. It was written by the lead guitarist and co-founder, a guy named Doug Hopkins. It's gloomy, it's self-pitying,

it's a post-breakup unrequited, love situation. He's basically stalking her. It's semi-problematic, and Hopkins wrote it, allegedly, about an ex-girlfriend who kicked him in the head at an R.E.M. concert. Or maybe she just punched him after the concert. Anyway, that's what it says on the internet. Whatever the details, the song's real-life backstory, is way heavier than it sounds. The very next track is called Allison Road. The lead singer of the gin blossoms, a guy named Robin Wilson, wrote it, And there's still a lot of melancholy and regret and whatnot, but it's upbeat, it's sunny in its way, and it starts like this. It's the same thing. It's like that old far side cartoon, the many moods of an Irish setter where it's six drawings of the same dog making the exact same face.

And under each drawing, it says happy or angry or excited or depressed. It's a versatile riff, let's say. The jangle contains multitudes. There is a sweetness, but there is also, if you do it right, a vast darkness. Doug Hopkins struggled with alcoholism and mental health issues and got kicked out of the band before they got famous and took his own life shortly after they got famous. But before he left us, he gave us the chorus that made the gin blossoms famous. We should talk about this word jangle briefly, I promise. It's a rock critic word. It's a little dorky.

For plenty of people, it's not a little pejorative. You can trace it from Mr. Tambourine man to this charming man, from the birds to REM. But don't be that guy at the party. Suffice it to say that jangle is always heavier than it sounds, both the word and the action. It's the sweetest ones you've got to watch out for. The gin blossoms formed in the late 80s in Tempe, Arizona, a bunch of random dudes from a bunch of other random bands who joined forces and somehow got really, really good at harnessing the jangle

and became functionally the house band at a band. Tempe Hot Wings joint called Long Wongs. That's what it was called. That Long Wongs in Tempe closed in 2004, but there's still one in Phoenix. The Long Wong is a hot dog. Personally, I would add chili to it, which would make it officially a Dragon Wong. While we're talking names, the legend is there's this notorious book from the late 50s called Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger. It's a tabloid proto-TMZ roasting of movie stars and all their scandals and dirty laundry, and there's a photo of W.C. Fields With these giant splotches on his face,

allegedly from drinking too much. There go, the gin blossoms. Regional fame ensues. The gin blossoms released their debut album, Dusted in 1989, recorded locally, released locally, a pretty big deal locally. If you really want to hear it in 2020, Dusted is a YouTube proposition,

unless you're the sort of person who'd pay 60 bucks for a used CD, which maybe you are, that type of. of person. The value in that, to my mind, is the chance to play fantasy A&R guy. So you imagine yourself as a big shot record label Stoge with your feet up on your gold-plated desk smoking a cigar with giant stacks of CDs from regional sensations teetering behind you. And you pulled dusted at random from one of these stacks and you pop it in, or you have your assistant pop it in, and you light another cigar. And play acting all this now, you try to imagine if you would have heard it. It, the fame, the fortune, the glory, MTV, the radio, karaoke.

30 years or so later, podcasts. Could this band be huge? Could this song be huge? It's a tough game sometimes, but not this time. It's all there on Dusted. It's all there on track nine, which is called Hey Jealousy. That's it. That's the song.

It's faster and it's crudder sounding in a charismatic sort of way. and there's a hot wings joint in Tempe, Arizona's scruffiness to it all, but it's hey jealousy. And the difference between that hey jealousy and the hey jealousy you know and love is down to diction and studio gloss. It's just now it's track two on the band's 1992 major label debut, which because this was 1992, they called New Miserable Experience. And just now the song sounds bigger and sharper and softer and harder and brighter and shinier. It sounds plated and gold. The idea of smuggling really sad lyrics into a super bright and catchy pop song did not originate with the gin blossoms, or with the 90s, or with rock and roll, or with pop songs, really. But in 1992, 93, 94, hey, jealousy on the radio was supposed to be the antidote, the contrast, the rom-com counter-programming to Nirvana, to Pearl Jam, to 9-inch nails, to grunge, to rage, to rage, to rage.

to macho anger and self-loathing and loathing loathing. It was just a bonus, really, that hey, jealousy could also be 10 times darker and sentiment than songs that sounded 10 times heavier, which you've got to credit to the guy who wrote it. Doug Hopkins. In retrospect, Doug Hopkins was the Pete Best of the gin blossoms, though when he was actually in the gin blossoms, he was arguably the Paul McCartney of the gin blossoms, or the John Lennon, or both. People say a lot that he could have been what Noel Gallagher was. was to Oasis, the cranky mastermind, the genius songwriter, the conscience. Doug didn't sing much,

but it was his voice, it was his angst. And in the early 90s, especially, your angst was the most sacred and powerful and monetizable thing that you owned. It's a very strange line, you can trust me not to think. But the original line, Doug's original line, was apparently, you can trust me not to drink, which unfortunately is way better. The lurid details that grimyer aspects of how Doug came to leave the band, I'm disinclined to get in the weeds too much. It's ugly, it's upsetting, it's contested, it's immaterial. The basic chronology, which everyone more or less agrees on now, is this. The Gin Blossom sign with A&M Records with a major, and an initial burst of major label bullshit ensues, but eventually they find themselves in Memphis,

Tennessee, recording at Ardent Studios. Then this is the band's big break, and Hopkins is struggling in this famous studio beneath the weight of these great expectations and all the drinking he's doing to manage these expectations. John Hampton, who produced the album, later explained it to Magnet Magazine this way. Have you ever seen the movie Leaving Las Vegas? Try making a record with someone like that. That was not the 90s movie you wanted to be compared to. Hopkins plays guitar all over a new miserable experience, but a lot of those parts he meant to re-record to improve. but he just couldn't, and his bandmates put up with it until they didn't.

They kicked him out before they'd even finished the record. It's possible that the label made them do it. So Hopkins goes back to Tempe, and new miserable experience comes out, and initially it bricks. The band tours relentlessly in the shitty van on the album cover, but it's going nowhere, and the whole thing looks like an abject failure, until one of these vague record label stories where the suits decide to give hate jealousy one more push. They'd shot a video for the song for $5,000 and then they shot another video for $10,000.

But now they decide to drop $40,000 on yet another video. That video is super boring. They're all just hanging out in somebody's house. Wilson sings to a fish in a fish bowl. He sings to a blender. I don't know, man. But it clicks. Hey, jealousy climbs the charts and found out about you follows.

Back in Tempe, Hopkins starts another band, and regional fame ensues, but the story goes that he quits. that band on stage after he botches a guitar solo, and afterward those guys won't take him back either. Meanwhile, he sits at home and watches the gin blossoms play his song on Jay Leno's Tonight Show, and he's pissed and he feels betrayed, and he wonders what his royalty cut might be. Eventually, he gets a gold record for Hey Jealousy, like the plaque you hang proudly on your wall, and he hangs it proudly on his wall, and then a few weeks later he smashes it,

and sometime after that he buys a gun at a bar. pawn shop, and he's found dead of a gunshot wound on Sunday, December 5, 1993. He was 32. Variety runs a small obituary, noting that it was his sixth suicide attempt in 10 years, and it quotes his sister, Sarah, as saying, when I saw him Thursday, I knew I'd never see him again. I just said, goodbye, Doug, and my mother did the same. Doug Hopkins does play the guitar solo on the famous version of Hey Jealousy. It's projection, it's always projection, really, but it's comforting to think you can still hear him there and hear him the way he always wanted to be heard, the darkness but also the sweetness, the turmoil, but also the greatness. Or at least

it sounded great on the radio and still sounds great as a karaoke break. Doug's bandmates have never had a problem telling anybody, even telling People magazine shortly after Doug's funeral, because by now the gin blossoms were People magazine sort of band, that they got huge off Doug's songs, that Doug's talent got them a record deal in the first place. But it's the surviving gin blossoms who turned all of that into a viable career. There is a separate and very specific talent, not a genius, but definitely a talent, to slugging it out,

to sticking around long after you're no longer the next big thing. In 1995, they had a big hit till I hear it from you on the Empire Records soundtrack. In 1996, they called their second major label album, Congratulations, I'm sorry, because it was still the 90s, and it charted higher than new miserable experience. Then they squabbled and deteriorated and broke up. Then they reformed in the mid-2000s and started putting out albums again, modest successes that at least gave them the excuse to tour.

And now what they mostly do and do well, and I imagine do quite lucratively, is tour, and tour pretty much exclusively with 90 survivors like themselves. They've toured with Fastball. They've toured with collective soul. These guys. They toured with Sugar Ray, Everclear, Lit, and Marcy Playground all at the same time. That was 2012.

It was the inaugural Summerland tour, which Everclear started doing every year with different bands, specifically to capitalize on 90s nostalgia. And in 2021, if anybody's touring at all, the gin blossoms will tour. with bare naked ladies and towed the wet sprocket. None of this is terribly craven. Any of those bills would have made perfect sense in the mid to late 90s. But rock band consolidation is a real thing. In 1994, for example, there were huge, glaring, irreconcilable differences,

philosophically between, say, Bush, R.E.M. and Soundgarden. Separate sounds in service of separate constituencies. But in 2017, I went to a hard rock festival in Columbus, Ohio, where Soundgarden were supposed to be the headliners, except their front man, Chris Cornell, took his own life a few days before the show. And so Bush, who were also on the bill, paid tribute to Soundgarden's lead singer

by covering REM's The One I Love, still one of the best and one of the hardest jangling songs you'll ever hear. It was all quite moving, even if it was also startling, that context collapse, that idea that the farther away these bands get from their prime, or at least their origin, the closer they huddle together for warmth. The gin blossoms aren't a rock and roll band.

They're not jangle pop. They're not power pop. They're not pop rock. They're not alt rock. Their genre in 2020 is the 90s. They're a 90s band. They play 90s music. The three new albums they've put out since 2006 are perfectly fine and sound like the 90s.

There's no shame in it. And moving forward, even moving forward starting now, there's a perfectly viable career in it. Assuming anybody's touring at all, years hence, decades hence, they'll tour with whatever other 90s bands are still kicking in whatever iterations, and those tours will do great, and every night the gin blossoms will play for somewhere between 50 and 90 minutes and play somewhere between six and ten songs off their crazy huge breakthrough album from 1992.

They don't play pieces of the night often enough, in my opinion. That's my jam also. But those sets will always climax with Hey Jealousy, even if they eventually do the thing where they walk on stage and play Hey Jealousy immediately just to get it out of the way and just to dare you to walk out in the middle of the show because they've already played the song they know you're there to hear. It's a real chess match. That's the best line in the song. Not the part about the cops, which introduces a whole confusing police chase elements, but the past is gone, but something might be found to take. take its place, which is a very sad and poignant and lovely idea, even if it's wrong. Because if you do it right, and you weaponize it without letting it consume you, the past is all you'll ever need. I want to talk to our producer, Isaac Lee, a professional musician.

We've talked a little bit about both versions of Hey Jealousy. And Isaac, I feel like when I talk about a song that's had a major label makeover, like there's this kind of homemade sounding version, and then there's the major label radio smash version. When I try and describe the difference between them, I just revert to magical realism, right? Like, it's not technical at all. It's just like they just sprinkled their radio MTV fairy dust on it or whatever.

So when you listen to these two versions of Hey, Jealousy Back to Back, what is it specifically that makes the second one sparkle? Sure. I mean, let's start with the sparkle there. There's a tambourine on the major label version, which definitely gives it literal, sparkle up on the high end, probably 7K to 12K.

And like that in itself gives it more sparkle. It opens up the mix. It's probably a little too loud. But when you're listening to it in your car or reel it out on your headphones, it's going to help open up the mix. But other than that, I mean, first of all, the dusted version, which is the original demo-ish version, it's faster tempo-wise. It feels rushed and definitely is inconsistent.

I'm not calling the drummer a bad drummer, but maybe on this particular recording, he's a bad drummer. And it sounds like it was performed live together in the studio without a click track. There's a slapback delay on the vocals, which I think is a little annoying and takes away the focus from the lyrics.

Whereas the major label version, it's slower, it's consistent. They're probably using a click track or at least the drummer was having an easier time. And there's no slapback on the label version. It sounds like there's like a tight reverb or maybe just like the resonance of the sound stage that the vocals are recorded in.

And probably some kind of midside processing. It's generally more consistent, wider, bigger, more dynamic. I mean, you don't have to be super technical. You can just kind of listen to it and be like, this sounds more open. There's more top end, there's more low end, and for lack of a better word, mixed and cohesive. Right.

Do you go in at all for the romantic idea of the dusted version being like real? Like, it's just a bunch of dudes in a room and they're vibing off each other. No, not at all. And there's something lost in like an antiseptic, like, Death Star, like major label studio mix. Well, no. No. And I've said, I mean, this is going to make me sound pretty heartless.

But that's a narrative. That's just the story that we tell ourselves when we're listening. It's like, oh, these are all just dudes trying to make it in a room. There's really not much sentimentality when you're just listening to it. It just sounds bad. If you don't know that that's the story that you tell yourself. And to me, I subscribe to the Andrew Shep's theory of. All that matters is what comes out of the speakers.

All that matters is the final stereo bus left and right. What you hear in our years is the only thing that matters. And if that sounds good and I have a visceral emotional response to what comes out of the speakers, that is the better version. That is the better song. That is the better mix. And I'm not a heartless person.

Like I obviously appreciate the raw energy of any kind of startup band. Like I understand that. At the same time, all that is a heartless person. all that matters is what the end product is and what it does to the listener. Right. That's ice cold, Isaac, but I do think I agree with you, but it's a little heartless, just a little. My guest today is Hanif Abdurakib, a poet, essayist, critic, best-selling author, Ohioan. Welcome, Hanif, thank you so much for being here. Thank you, my fellow Ohioan, only near miles away from each other we are.

It's very poignant. We're so close, but yet so far. far away and never meeting again in real life, but it's great to talk to you. Frankly, I wanted to talk to you about whatever song you wanted to talk about, and I sent you a giant list, and you picked, hey, jealousy. What is it about this song specifically? So the gin blossoms used to come here all the time. Do you ever see them when they came here? Any time? I did not. No, that's my fault. Where did it? In Columbus. In Columbus, yeah, they used to come. It was like them and dashboard and third eye blind. We're kind of in that cluster of bands who would come through here every single year.

And my brain remembers it as dashboard was like the summer closing concert, right? You get dashboard in like August, September before the outdoor venue we have here shut down for the season. But gin blossoms, you got them to open the summer, right? Jim Blossoms would come through. And their concerts were always so fascinating because they're one of those bands where, no matter what they're playing, everyone is waiting for the song, you know, Or at least for them, like a small series of songs, right?

Found out about you maybe or like follow you down maybe. But everyone is like really, really waiting for hey, jealousy. So that feels like a joyous occasion in the beginning of summer, obviously, whereas the song itself, at least lyrically, at least if you burrowed down into it, is so sad. Like, is that part of the attraction is the dissonance of opening summer with something like that? It's dark. Well, I don't think a lot of people think about it as a dark song, but it's super dark. its central concerns, at least for me, are loneliness and emotional dislocation from something

more warmed or like a beloved. And so I'm a big fan of those songs that trick people into, I'm thinking about the big, large sing-along songs that trick people into this kind of like the release of the chorus, right, where all the voices come together and sing the song and everyone feels free, but the song's actually maybe a little fucked up. I mean, like we talked about third-eye blind. I mean, semi-charmed life is another one of the. in that wheelhouse, right? Sure. Crystal meth, yeah.

But like when you're a kid, you're like, you know, crystal meth sounds fun. It sounds great. You know, but it's one of those things. And HLC also came out when I was young. I just remember it being top tier road trip music, right? Windows down, yelling into the great expanse of Midwest road trips, which, as you probably know, it was like a lot of flat land, a lot of beige, some green, but mostly beige. A lot of beige.

And that is how the song lived in my memory, but it's pretty dark, and I think perhaps made darker by the fact that Doug Hopkins killed himself shortly after released and had a big run on the charts. Yeah, yeah, you got kicked out of the band, and so he's watching his old bandmates get famous off his song. Were you immediately aware of the darkness in this song? I was going to ask you when you first heard it, but I think the better question is like when it first clicked for you, when it became more than just another song on the radio where you realized it really was something special. Yeah, so in 20,

it's a long, long after my first introduction to it, I would say maybe 2006. I want to say whenever Teigen and Sarah's, the con came out, but I was going through this intense breakup, and it was in the winter, and I wasn't leaving my house. I was in my apartment,

and it was one of the bad Ohio winters. Columbus, I mean, as you know, again, And we get, it alternates where we get like, oh, this is a mild winter. And then as punishment for the mild winter, we get like the pipes freezing and bursting everywhere. So no one can leave even if they want to. It's one of those winters. And I was inside and I was just being very melodramatic as is my way, I suppose. Yes.

And I was, you know, really rocking with the Tegan and Sarah record because the con is like an immense breakup record. And then I remember I had one of those old, old, old radios where like if you stopped a CD, it would flip automatically to the radio. You know? Yeah. And so I stopped the CD to take it out, and I flipped to the radio, and Hey, Jealousy was on. And I was so enraged by what felt like an intrusion, right? An intrusion on my own misery. Yes.

And as I was, like, about to turn to go down there and just flick the station elsewhere, I was thinking about the lyrics for the first time. You know, I think sadness sometimes brings me closer to the lyrical. It brings me closer to the granular nature of the music. And I was like, oh, this is awful. This is like an awful sad, sad thing. It really is. Especially that first line, you know, in no shape for driving and got nowhere to go.

I don't partake in the substances or the drinking and whatnot, not because I'm like a choir boy, but mostly because I live a life that is rooted primarily in anxiety and fear. And so, you know, but even understanding that, I'm like, oh, man, having no place to go and not being able to drive is a dark, this is a dark place to be it, you know? Absolutely. The first verse and the third verse of the song are identical, you know, which is profound, maybe the idea that both the singer and the songwriter are stuck in this loop. Like, is that an elite poetic device, that repetition, or is it just that they couldn't think of a third verse?

It's okay. It's possible. It's possible they couldn't think of anything. I think about this in music all the time. Like, could Cisco not think of anything with the song song and it was just like, I'm just going to keep running this back? I'm just going to keep running it back because it's not. I just can't think of anything.

Or was the lyric just that good? Did it hit so right? He was like, why would I think of anything else? It was that one in Cisco's case. In Cisco's cases? Yeah. He took the let me sing it again very literally. You know what I mean?

But I think, so the trick that I talk about sometimes in writing workshops is repetition and how as deliverers of language, we have the power and potential to allow for people to enter the language differently once they've been expelled from it the first time. Right? And so it might not be exciting to hear repetition at first. We're like, oh, this verse again. But especially in this song where there's kind of like a break between the verses, you're reintering it with a better understanding of the emotional anguish that rest in the lyrics.

And so it allows for, I think, a better understanding of the emotional weight of the song, even though the language is exactly the same. It's being delivered from a different point. It's being delivered with a different set of knowledge from a listener's point of view. And so it isn't so much as like going into a room, leaving a room and re-entering that room with one piece of furniture moved. It's actually like sitting in one room for a while, getting an understanding of the room so that when you enter another room, your brain is still piecing together what you witnessed in the last room. Right. That's intense, man.

Sorry. That's beautiful. No, please. The gin blossoms would be honored with that interpretation, I would have to hope. I was thinking about the way that death changes your perception of a song. With someone like Kirk Cobain, I think his pain was immediately evident, and that was always the narrative, was his struggle. But a song like Blind Melons No Rain, right?

Which what struck me at first is like a perfectly pleasant, like, scruffy bro, like rock song and there's a girl dressed as a bee in the video, and it's fine. But then Blind Melon's frontman, Shannon Hound died. and suddenly that song takes on this really sad and funereal air. All I can say is that my life is pretty plain, suddenly is this ultra-profound sort of statement. Does Haye jealousy change fundamentally when you know too much about it?

Kind of. I mean, death is the greatest editor, right? Because death affects the way that we hear things. Because all I can say is that my life is pretty plain, etc. I mean, that could be this whimsical, had he lived and been alive, that could have been this kind of like just whimsical entry point to a song that didn't need to be steeped in anguish. But because someone is not alive to answer for themselves or their creations, then I think we affix, we sometimes affix these ideas of anguish to the lyric for them. Right. Back when you're taking these beige road trips in which the song figures like where are you coming from, where are you going, who's in the car?

Like, are you singing along to the song actively? Like what's happening? Yeah, so this is a song I would never sing along to alone because I think, especially after I got a grasp for how sad it actually was, singing along to it alone felt somewhat sadder. And so I think it is a communal thing. And so I used to road trip all the time. I used to road trip back when I had more time to do it and I wish I still did that. I used to just kind of drive. Also, I mean, coming up on the punk scene in the Midwest meant that you were just driving kind of all the time, you know, if you were in Columbus specifically. because, you know, the shows would be in Chicago or Detroit or Pittsburgh or on a less robust

night Louisville, you know? I would kind of take those shorter road trips with other people who love music but potentially did not love that music, you know, like punk kids who didn't really love like alt pop, but who knew that song. And I think that is maybe the song's most core audience right now, right? It's like people who maybe don't love the Jin Bossans but know that song, which only feels a little unfair because I do want to say that I think the Jim Blossoms are more than just that song to like a large degree. And I saw someone sent me a video that they did recently, like maybe last year, in maybe Spotify studios where they covered radiohead.

And it was stunning. It was like really stunning. I mean, I know your face. They covered fake plastic trees. And I know I can see that the look on your face, even though people will not know that we're looking at each other. But I can see the look on your face right now. It's like, surprise and shock and a little bit of fear. That was mine too. But then I played it. That's fair. It hits.

Even outside of that, though, I think they have a lot of good, like, I think the gin blossoms have a cluster of really good songs. They are, for me, a quintessential greatest hits band where I don't know if I want to sift through the full discography, but I would take like a 10 to 12, you know, and there are a lot of those, I mean, Journey, Hollow Notes. I mean, we're talking, sorry if I offended your sensibilities from the Hall of Notes. No, no, I just, that's. And I mean this on, you know, when I say a greatest hits band,

I mean like the greatest hits album can span anywhere from like 10 to 24 greatest hits. But I think at some point, the amount of songs that you have on the amount of albums just isn't holding up the same as like the amount of great songs that are there. And so then you become kind of like, you know, but in the gym blossoms really fit a good 10 to 12 greatest hits type thing for me. Yeah. This has been awesome. And Eve, thanks so much for talking.

Rob, thanks so much. And whenever we can get out of the house again, I hope to see you around town. We'll go to Dairy Queen. We'll go to Dairy Queen. This is Rob Harvilla with 60 songs that explain the 90s. Thanks again to Henneef Abdur Keeb, to our producers, Isaac Lee and Justin Sales, and to you for listening. Now let's just listen to the famous version, the superior version, of the gin blossoms, Hey Jealousy. See you next time.